


Blanket

by SpiritPhantasm



Category: Gintama
Genre: Gen, cuddles and snuggles, spoiler for recent chapters, take place in Epilouge Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 12:57:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15606792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiritPhantasm/pseuds/SpiritPhantasm
Summary: It doesn't take long for Gintoki to find out Shouyou is a cuddler. Twelve years after his death, Gintoki finally understands why.





	Blanket

**Author's Note:**

> I thought my heartbreak is over after the Utsuro fight is done. I am wrong. Thank you, Gorrilla.

It didn’t take long for Gintoki to notice that Shouyou is a cuddler. A bit hard to miss when a portion of his childhood memories are of waking up to the smell of pine and sunshine. 

It first surfaced a full moon cycle after their first meeting. At that point, with no village to return to let alone a house to call home, they journey through the lands seeking a place to belong. More often than not, they’d fall asleep staring at the stars than they would the rotting roof of a barn or an inn. Gintoki, unfamiliar to anything but the cold ground trampled into hardness by an army’s march, didn’t mind either. Unlike back then there will always be a fire crackling merrily and a skilled swordsman who won’t draw his blade on Gintoki and that’s more than enough for him to fall into a deep sleep. 

On that night, he lied under a tattered blanket. So used to the chill that creeps into his fingers and toes that he don’t try to rub feeling back into the appendages. It was easier to just let it spread rather than trying to warm them and feel more of the cold. With his senses numbed, it was easier to ignore the cold. 

But he wakes up to the absolute dark before dawn, untouched by the early winter’s cold and surrounded by warmth. Somewhere in the night, Shouyou must have moved and became a breathing wall on Gintoki’s back, curling around him radiating warmth. Both blankets have been combined and piled above Gintoki until he was warm and toasty from his own body heat and Shouyou’s. 

In the battlefield, even a light doze in another human’s presence means death. That twisted reality has been etched so deep that he tensed. But the lazy, soft heat comforts him until he relaxes. 

What a strange man, the demon child thought. Like this, Shouyou’s fingers and toes must be freezing but he doesn’t make an attempt to warm himself. Rather, he gave up his blanket and warms another.  

That was not the last time it happens. Every time they slept, Gintoki always found himself in Shouyou’s arm one way or another. Their starting position doesn’t matter, and the temperature is given no damn. It can be under the dark sky or a rotting roof, under the heat of summer night or the chill of winter’s dark, and Gintoki always wake up warm, Shouyou curled around him. 

On the next town, they bartered both blankets for a big one that can wrap around them. 

After Shouka Sonjuku is formed, the frequency of snuggling dropped and Gintoki could care less. He has a place to call home, annoying kids to call companions and Shouyou’s smile are always lighter. When he slept, it’s dreamless and he wakes up to safety. 

Though, that doesn’t last long. 

Katsura and Takasugi found out about the cuddling thing and forced him to take both along. The four of them would huddle together in Shouyou’s futon, hissing curses and trample each other to get comfortable. It was cramped and someone’s bound to have a foot in their face come morning. But it was something special to all three children so they never stop. Not as long as Shouyou still welcomes them with a smile and open arms. 

Gintoki doesn’t mind it. He’s even say he liked the snuggling but he never understood Shouyou’s compulsion to wrap around him in sleep. Whenever asked, Shouyou only ever smiled and told him he would understand someday.

Years after that, after Shouka Sonjuku is burned to the ground, after Shouyou’s blood stains his sword, after the sinking realization that he can never return to the nights of huddling in Shouyou’s futon with Katsura and Takasugi, after the monster that wear Shouyou’s face laugh at humanity’s pathetic struggle, Gintoki still doesn’t and had honestly thought he would never. 

But now. 

Now Gintoki finally understands. 

The fire snaps and cracks the wood it’s consuming, filling the silence of autumn night with the cheers of its feast. With a fallen tree on his back and the soft ground beneath his ass, Gintoki stares into the fire. Inevitably his gaze is drawn to the side, to the small back sleeping curled under a fraying blanket, tiny feet close enough to brush the side of his thigh. 

The child is cold, Gintoki can see it in the faint trembling of his limbs, in the goose bumps that would follow after shivers. He reaches out and spread his palm on the child’s back, a pang ringing hollow in his heart when he sees how one palm covers more than half. So small and so thin, this new incarnation of neverending suffering and ephemeral light, that Gintoki fears that if he even presses too hard, the child’s spine would snap, his fragile ribs crack, a tiny heart punctured and stopped. 

He wants to take his hand off, wants to sit as far as possible from this tiny creature whose blind trust allow him to sleep in the presence of a man with his hands drenched in blood, who could, who _would_ , kill him if given the right reason.  

But this small body can be destroyed by any other hand as easily as his. The monsters that claws at the light, the darkness that reaches out to consume him whole, the wicked that would crush him as easily as a fallen leaf. Even though Gintoki knows this child won’t die so easily, won’t die period, something in him rejects the idea of this child, of Shouyou, being hurt in his presence.  

A plunge of white from Gintoki’s mouth as he exhaled, loud and long until his lungs burns for oxygen. 

“Shouyou…” he murmurs, “You’ve always been a cryptic bastard.” 

So the demon lies down, ignoring the better instincts that tells him to go away, as far as possible, before he can break this fragile thing just by touching him. Gintoki ignores them and draws Shouyou in with his one arm, piling both blankets around the sleeping child, falling asleep curled around something precious who entrusted to him his defenseless sleeping back. 

And the little body held close to him is so warm that for a moment, Gintoki forgot that he’s a demon. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please.... Just let them be happy


End file.
